FastForward 1812

On August 15, 2013, President Ronald J. Daniels and Dean Paul B. Rothman formed a Committee on the Innovation Ecosystem to consider options for an innovation center to support entrepreneurship in the life sciences. The Committee consulted widely across the university community, considered a wide range of internal and external studies and information, visited innovation hubs around the nation, and solicited feedback from prominent venture capital firms and pharmaceutical and biotech companies. In May 2014, the Committee produced its Final Report.

About

On August 15, 2013, President Ronald J. Daniels and Dean Paul B. Rothman formed a Committee on the Innovation Ecosystem to consider options for an innovation center to support entrepreneurship in the life sciences. The Committee consulted widely across the university community, considered a wide range of internal and external studies and information, visited innovation hubs around the nation, and solicited feedback from prominent venture capital firms and pharmaceutical and biotech companies. In May 2014, the Committee produced its Final Report.

EMPHATIC CONCLUSION

“Our emphatic conclusion is that the university needs to take a broad range of steps to strengthen its innovation ecosystem, in a manner that spans the entire Johns Hopkins community.”

“Our view is that the university should make an investment in its innovation ecosystem that consists broadly of three parts.”

SPACE

“The space should be integrated seamlessly into FastForward and other entrepreneurial spaces that now exist across the university, with office, laboratory and design studio space for young companies, open and co-location space for educational opportunities and creative collisions, and room for university administrative offices that facilitate licensing and entrepreneurship activities.”

FUNDING

“The second area of need is the funding of translational activity. The development of a new therapeutic or invention is a challenging and uncertain process in the best of times, but we now see private companies easing away from translational research and development, leading to what is termed a ‘valley of death’ in the financing of translational research. The generation of urgent and worthy ideas now vastly outpaces available funding.”

SERVICES

“The final component is a set of resources and incentives calibrated to provide the needed support for the university’s scholar-inventors. The needed set of investments will take a number of forms.”

The University Implementation Plan

On March 4, 2015, the university released the University Implementation Plan for the Innovation Ecosystem, a blueprint for how it plans to respond to each of the 22 recommendations in the Committee report.